


Radiation Burns

by Eshnoazot



Series: Avengers prompt ficathon [1]
Category: The Avengers (Marvel) - All Media Types
Genre: Gen, tw: attempted suicide, tw: burns
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2014-01-23
Updated: 2014-01-23
Packaged: 2018-01-09 18:18:57
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 525
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/1149271
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Eshnoazot/pseuds/Eshnoazot
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>It’s easier to think of the Other Guy in clinical terms, but even easier to think in purely abstract concepts; a metaphorical radiation burn left imprinted into the very fabric of his DNA. Burns are easier to treat than rage, because burns can heal over time but rage has healed no one.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Radiation Burns

**Author's Note:**

> Leave a prompt in the comments, if you wish.

The words curl through his mind like smoke; heavy and thick with an aftertaste of burnt saliva and chemicals that makes him gag on thoughts, however fleeting. His lungs are choked with the ash of too many dead and scorched from the hell-fire and brimstone of rage that sits in his core, poisoning and swelling the pathways from his lungs to his heart.

It’s easier to think of the Other Guy in clinical terms, but even easier to think in purely abstract concepts; a metaphorical  _radiation burn_  left imprinted into the very fabric of his DNA. Burns are easier to treat than rage, because burns can heal over time but rage has healed  _no one_.

It is all too easy to hide the combustion of emotions behind calm smiles and gentle gestures, but it always feels like an act, a performance - thick damp bandages wound too tight around festering raw wounds that scream out for balms and painkillers. 

The more you lie to yourself the easier it becomes.

But he knows all too well how to treat radiation burns; _clean dry dressings, systemic antimicrobial_ _therapy,_ and he knows nothing of how to deal with the one thing that stops his self-told lies in their tracks and forces him to think like the scientist he is. To face the green hiding just out of sight in all his wounds and creases and concede that the poison lingering near his heart just may reach its destination one day.

_The presence of combined injury (exposure to radiation plus trauma or radiation burn) increases the likelihood of generalized sepsis._

He draws parallels late a night with a gun in his mouth and concedes that he went septic long ago. He can see the burns all too clearly; peeling past layers of skin and tissues, past muscle, bone and organs. A charred area of angry-green and black with exposed nerves and bones that paints him as a modern Typhoid Mary created through his own poisonous septic nature.  _Like father, like son_  his ashy-lungs announce when he is alone,  _the apple doesn’t fall far from the tree._

He shrouds himself in the good memories still lurking around the edges of his mind; pure oxygen to his starved lungs.  _Betty’s smile, her lingering shampoo, the kindness in her words and the way her eyes lit up when she spoke so passionately._  But the burns are too deep for mere memories and phantom scents to heal, and he doesn’t even have time to consider regret before the bullet tears through his tissues.

The regret doesn’t come until he wakes up to the sunlight with a bullet in his hand and tears of desperation soothing his cracked and dry skin. But time goes past and seasons change, and poisonous regret can be cast out of skin through tears, through sweat.

But time goes past and wounds heal, even if the word  _Avenger_ is the only thing serving as a  _clean, dry dressing_ , even if the word  _'friends'_  is the only thing serving as  _systemic antimicrobial_ _therapy._

Wounds heal, because sometimes rage may not be able to  _heal someone,_ but sometimes rage can  _ _save_  someone._


End file.
